Yoruba language

Yoruba (native name ede Yorùbá, 'the Yoruba language') is a dialect continuum of West Africa with over 22 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and traces of it are found among communities in Brazil and Cuba (where it is called Nago). Yoruba is an isolating, tonal language with SVO syntax. Apart from referring to the aggregate of dialects and their speakers, the term Yoruba is used for the standard, written form of the language. Yoruba is classified as a Niger-Congo language of the Yoruboid branch of Defoid, Benue-Congo.

The traditional Yoruba area, the southwestern corner of Nigeria, is commonly called Yorubaland and is comprised of today's Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Kwara, and Lagos states as well as the western part of Kogi state. Geophysically, Yorubaland forms part of a plateau (elevation 366 m) bordered to the north and east by the Niger River. A large part of it is densely forested; the northern part however, including Oyo, lies in the savanna to the north of the forest.

History

The ancestor of the Yoruba speakers is, according to their oral traditions, Oduduwa, son of Olúdùmarè, the supreme god of the Yoruba. Although they share a common history, it is only since the second half of the nineteenth century that the children of Oduduwa share one name. Before the abolition of the slave trade, Yorubas among the liberated slaves in Freetown were known among Europeans as Akú, a name derived from the first words of Yoruba greetings such as Ẹ kú àárọ̀ ‘good morning’ and Ẹ kú alẹ́ ‘good evening’.For discussion, see Hair 1967:6, 6n12; Fagborun 1994:13. At some stage the term Yariba or Yoruba came into use, first confined to the Ọyọ Kingdom; the term was used among the Hausa (as it is today) but its origins are unclear Fagborun comments that '^*t is definitely not morphologically indigenous' (1994:13.. Under the influence of the Yoruba Samuel Ajayi Crowther, (first Bishop of West Africa and first African bishop of the Church of England, who was a war captive freed on the high seas en-route to slavery) and subsequent missionaries, and for a large part due to the development of a written version of the language, the term Yoruba was extended to include all speakers of related dialects.

The first appearance in print of any variety of Yoruba dates from 1819, in the form of a small vocabulary collected by Bowdich, an English diplomatic agent in Ashanti.Bowdich, T.E. (1819), Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, pp. 209, 505, as cited in Hair (1967) This is relatively late for a West African language spoken as widely as Yoruba (cf. Akan, 1602; Ewe, 1658); it can be attributed to the fact that virtually no European trade took place on the Yoruba coast before the nineteenth century. Linguistic means —including, for example, historical-comparative linguistics, glottochronology, and dialectology — used along with both traditional (oral) historical sources and archaeological finds, have shed some light on the history of the Yorubas and their language before this point. The North-West Yoruba dialects, for example, show more linguistic innovations. This, combined with the fact that South-East and Central Yoruba areas generally have older settlements, according to some suggests a later date of immigration for North-West YorubaAdetugbọ 1973:192-3. See also the section Dialects..

Varieties

Dialects

The Yoruba dialect continuum itself consists of over fifteen varieties which can be classified into three major dialect areas: Northwest, Central, and Southeast.This widely followed classification is based on Adetugbọ’s (1982) dialectological study — the classification originated in his 1967 PhD thesis The Yoruba Language in Western Nigeria: Its Major Dialect Areas. See also Adetugbọ 1973:183-193. Of course, clear boundaries can never be drawn and peripheral areas of dialectal regions often have some similarities to adjoining dialects.

North-West Yoruba (NWY).
- Abẹokuta, Ibadan, Ọyọ, Ọṣun and Lagos areas
Central Yoruba (CY)
- Igbomina, Ifẹ, Ekiti, Akurẹ, Ẹfọn, and Ijẹṣa areas.
South-East Yoruba (SEY)
- Okitipupa, Ondo, Ọwọ, Ṣagamu, and parts of Ijẹbu.

North-West Yoruba is historically a part of the benin empire. In NWY dialects, Proto-Yoruba /gh/ (the velar fricative ) and /gw/ have merged into /w/; the upper vowels /i ̣/ and /ụ/ were raised and merged with /i/ and /u/, just as their nasal counterparts, resulting in a vowel system with seven oral and three nasal vowels. Ethnographically, traditional government is based on a division of power between civil and war chiefs; lineage and descent are unilineal and agnatic.

South-East Yoruba was probably for a long time part of the Benin Empire.Adetugbọ 1973:185. In contrast to NWY, lineage and descent are largely multilineal and cognatic, and the division of titles into war and civil is unknown. Linguistically, SEY has retained the /gh/ and /gw/ contrast, while it has lowered the nasal vowels /ịn/ and /ụn/ to /ẹn/ and /ọn/, respectively. SEY has collapsed the second and third person plural pronominal forms; thus, àn án wá can mean either 'you (pl.) came' or 'they came' in SEY dialects, whereas NWY for example has ẹ wá 'you (pl.) came' and wọ́n wá 'they came', respectively. The emergence of a plural of respect may have prevented coalescence of the two in NWY dialects.

Central Yoruba forms a transitional area in that the lexicon has much in common with NWY, whereas it shares many ethnographical features with SEY. Its vowel system is the least innovating of the three dialect groups, having retained nine oral-vowel contrasts and six or seven nasal vowels, and an extensive vowel harmony system.

Standard Yoruba

Standard Yoruba (also known as literary Yoruba, the Yoruba koiné, common Yoruba and often simply as Yoruba) is a separate member of the dialect cluster. It is the written form of the language, the standard variety learnt at school and that spoken by newsreaders on the radio. Standard Yoruba has its origin in the 1850's, when Samuel A. Crowther, native Yoruba and the first African Bishop, published a Yoruba grammar and started his translation of the Bible. Though for a large part based on the Ọyọ and Ibadan dialects, Standard Yoruba incorporates several features from other dialectsCf. for example the following remark by Adetugbọ (1967, as cited in Fagborun 1994:25): "While the orthography agreed upon by the missionaries represented to a very large degree the phonemes of the Abẹokuta dialect, the morpho-syntax reflected the Ọyọ-Ibadan dialects".. Additionally, it has some features peculiar to itself only, for example the simplified vowel harmony system, as well as foreign structures, such as calques from English which originated in early translations of religious works.

Because the use of Standard Yoruba did not result from some deliberate linguistic policy, much controversy exists as to what constitutes 'genuine Yoruba', with some writers holding the opinion that the Ọyọ dialect is the most pure form, and others stating that there is no such thing as genuine Yoruba at all. Standard Yoruba, the variety learnt at school and used in the media, has nonetheless been a powerful consolidating factor in the emergence of a common Yoruba identity.

Writing system

Yoruba orthography originated in the early work of CMS missionaries working among the Aku in Freetown, notably Kilham and Raban. They assembled vocabularies and published short notes on Yoruba grammar. One of their informants in Sierra Leone was Crowther, who later would proceed to study his native language Yoruba. In early grammar primers and translations of portions of the English Bible, Crowther used the Latin alphabet largely without tone markings. The only diacritic used was a dot below certain vowels to signify their open variants , viz. ẹ and ọ. Over the years the orthography was revised to take care of tone marking among other things. In 1875 the Church Missionary Society (CMS) organised a conference on Yoruba Orthography; the standard devised there was the basis for the orthography of the steady flow of religious and educational literature over the next seventy years.

The current orthography of Yoruba derives from a 1966 report of the Yoruba Orthography Committee, along with Ayọ Bamgboṣe's 1965 Yoruba Orthography, a study of the earlier orthographies and an attempt to bring Yoruba orthography in line with actual speech as much as possible. Still largely similar to the older orthography, it employs the Latin alphabet modified by the use of the digraph gb and certain diacritics, including the traditional vertical line set under the letters , , and . In many publications the line is replaced by a dot (Ẹ/ẹ, Ọ/ọ, Ṣ/ṣ). The vertical line has been used to avoid the mark being fully covered by an underline.

Ẹ

Ọ

Ṣ

ẹ

ọ

ṣ

The Latin letters c, q, v, x, z are not used.

The pronunciation of the letters without diacritics corresponds more or less to their International Phonetic Alphabet equivalents, except for the labial-velar stops (written as <p>) and (written as ), in which both consonants are pronounced simultaneously rather than sequentially. The diacritic underneath vowels indicates an open vowel, pronounced with the root of the tongue retracted (so is pronounced with an IPA and with an IPA ). represents a postalveolar consonant like the English sh, <y> represents a palatal approximant like English y, and <j> a voiced palatal plosive, as is common in many African orthographies.

In addition to the vertical bars, three further diacritics are used on vowels and syllabic nasal consonants to indicate the language's tones: an acute accent for the high tone, a grave accent for the low tone, and an optional macron for the middle tone. These are used in addition to the line in and . When more than one tone is used in one syllable, the vowel can either be written once for each tone (for example, *òó for a vowel with tone rising from low to high) or, more rarely in current usage, combined into a single accent. In this case, a caron is used for the rising tone (so the previous example would be written ǒ) and a tilde for other possibilities.

Ẹ/

Ẹ́/

Ẹ̀/

Ọ/

Ọ́/

Ọ̀/

Ọ/

ẹ/

ẹ́/

ẹ̀/

ọ/

ọ́/

Linguistic features

Phonology

The three possible syllable structures of Yoruba are consonant+vowel (CV), vowel alone (V), and syllabic nasal (N). Every syllable bears one of the three tones: high ́, mid (generally left unmarked), and low ̀. The sentence I didn't go'' provides examples of the three syllable types:

— — I
ò — — not (negation)
lọ — — to go

Vowels and consonants

Standard Yoruba has seven oral and five nasal vowels. There are no diphthongs in Yoruba; sequences of vowels are pronounced as separate syllables. Dialects differ in the number of vowels they have; see above.

	Oral vowels		Nasal vowels
	Front	Back	Front	Back
Close
Close-mid
Open-mid
Open

The status of a fifth nasal vowel, , is controversial. Although the sound does occur in speech, several authors have argued it to be not phonemically contrastive; often, it is in free variation with .Notably, Ayọ Bamgboṣe (1966:8). Orthographically, nasal vowels are normally represented by an oral vowel symbol followed by n, i.e. in, un, ẹn, ọn, except in case of the ^* allophone of /l/ (see below) preceding a nasal vowel, i.e. inú 'inside, belly' is actually pronounced .Abraham in his Dictionary of Modern Yoruba deviates from this custom, explicitly indicating the nasality of the vowel; thus, inú is found under inún, etc.

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Labial-velar	Glottal
Plosive
Nasal			()
Fricative
Approximant
Lateral approximant

The voiceless plosives /t/ and /k/ are slightly aspirated; in some Yoruba varieties, /t/ and /d/ are more dental. The rhotic consonant is realized as a flap , or in some varieties (notably Lagos Yoruba) as the postalveolar approximant . Like many other languages of the region, Yoruba has the labial-velar stops and , e.g. pápá 'field', gbọ̄gbọ̄ 'all'. Notably, it lacks the common voiceless bilabial plosive /p/, which is why /k͡p/ is written as <p>. It also lacks a phoneme ; though the letter <n> is used for the sound in the orthography, it strictly speaking refers to an allophone of which immediately precedes a nasal vowel.

There is also a syllabic nasal which forms a syllable nucleus by itself. When it precedes a vowel it is a velar nasal , e.g. n ò lọ 'I didn't go'. In other cases its place of articulation is homorganic with the following consonant, for example ó ń lọ 'he is going', ó ń fò 'he is jumping'.

Tone

Yoruba is a tonal language with three level tones: High, Low and Mid; the latter is the default tone. Several authors have argued that the Mid-tone is not specified underlyingly, but rather is assigned by a default rule (Pulleyblank 1986, Fọlarin 1987, Akinlabi 1985). Evidence includes examples like the following:
rí 'see' aṣọ 'clothing' → ráṣọ 'see clothing', contrasted with rí 'see' ọ̀bẹ 'knife' → rọ́^!bẹ 'see a knife'
In the first example, the final vowel of the verb rí is deleted but its High tone easily attaches to the first syllable of aṣọ, the Mid tone of which disappears without a trace. In the second example, the Low tone of the first syllable of ọ̀bẹ is not as easily deleted; it causes a downstep (marked by ^!, i.e., a lowering of subsequent tones. The ease with which the Mid tone gives way is attributed to it not being specified underlyingly. Cf. Bamgboṣe 1966:9 (who calls the downstep effect 'the assimilated low tone'). Every syllable must have at least one tone; a syllable containing a long vowel can have two tones. Contour tones (i.e. rising or falling tone melodies) are usually analysed as separate tones occurring on adjacent tone bearing units and thus have no phonemic status.Cf. Bamgboṣe 1966:6: The so-called glides (…) are treated in this system as separate tones occurring on a sequence of two syllables. Tones are marked by use of the acute accent for High tone (á, ń), the grave accent for Low tone (à, ǹ); Mid is unmarked, except on syllabic nasals where it is indicated using a macron (a, n̄); see below). Examples:

H: ó bẹ́ 'he jumped'; síbí 'spoon'
M: ó bẹ 'he is forward'; ara 'body'
L: ó bẹ̀ 'he asks for pardon'; ọ̀kọ̀ 'spear'

Assimilation and elision

When a word precedes another word beginning with a vowel, assimilation or deletion ('elision') of one of the vowels often takes place See Bamgboṣe 1965a for more details. See also Ward 1952:123–133 ('Chapter XI: Abbreviations and Elisions').. In fact, since syllables in Yoruba normally end in a vowel, and most nouns start with one, this is a very common phenomenon, and indeed only is absent in very slow, unnatural speech. The orthography here follows speech in that word divisions are normally not indicated in words that are contracted as a result of assimilation or elision: ra ẹja → rẹja 'buy fish'. Sometimes however, authors may choose to use an inverted comma to indicate an elided vowel as in ní ilé → n’ílé 'in the house'.

Long vowels within words usually signal that a consonant has been elided word-internally. In such cases, the tone of the elided vowel is retained, e.g. àdìrò → ààrò 'hearth'; koríko → koóko 'grass'; òtító → òótó 'truth'.

Grammar

Yoruba is an isolating language. Basic constituent order is subject, verb, object (SVO), as in ó na Adé 'he hit Adé'. The bare verb stem denotes a completed action (often called perfect); tense and aspect are marked by preverbal particles such as ń 'imperfect/present continuous', ti 'past'. Negation is expressed by a preverbal particle kò. Serial verb constructions are common, as in many other languages of West Africa.

Yoruba has a distinction between human and non-human nouns; probably a remainder of the noun class system of proto-Niger-Congo, the distinction is only apparent in the fact that the two groups require different interrogative particles: tani for human nouns (‘who?’) and kini for non-human nouns (‘what?’). The associative construction (covering possessive/genitive and related notions) consists of juxtaposing nouns in the order modified-modifier as in inú àpótí {inside box} 'the inside of the box', fìlà Àkàndé 'Akande’s cap' or àpótí aṣọ 'box for clothes' (Bamgboṣe 1966:110, Rowlands 1969:45-6). More than two nouns can be juxtaposed: rélùweè abẹ́ ilẹ̀ (railway under ground) ‘underground railway’, inú àpótí aṣọ 'the inside of the clothes box'. In the rare case where this results in two possible readings, disambiguation is left to the context.

There are two ‘prepositions’: ní ‘on, at, in’ and sí ‘onto, towards’. The former indicates location and absence of movement, the latter encodes location/direction with movement (Sachnine 1997:19). Position and direction are expressed by these prepositions in combination with spatial relational nouns like orí ‘top’, apá ‘side’, inú ‘inside’, etí ‘edge’, abẹ́ ‘under’, ilẹ̀ ‘down’, etc. Many of these spatial relational terms are historically related to body-part terms.

Vocabulary

To the north of Yorubaland, Hausa is spoken. The long-standing contact between the Yoruba and the Hausa culture has influenced both languages. The imprint left by Hausa on Yoruba can be seen most clearly in the many loan-words. Two kinds of Hausa loan words can be distinguished: first, words of pure Hausa origin; and secondly, words that can be traced back to Arabic which have entered the Yoruba lexis through Hausa. Examples of the first type include gèjíyà 'tiredness' (< H. gàjíyàà), Ọbángíjì 'Almighty God' (< H. Ùbángíjì, lit. 'father of the house'). Examples of the second type include words like àlùbáríkà 'blessing', àlàáfíà 'well-being', and àlùbọ́sà 'onion' (Oyètádé & Buba 2000).

Literature

Yoruba has an extensive literature, both oral and written.

Oral literature

Odu Ifa

Written literature

Notes and references

Notes

References

Oyètádé, B. Akíntúndé & Buba, Malami (2000) 'Hausa Loan Words in Yorùbá', in Wolff & Gensler (eds.) Proceedings of the 2nd WoCAL, Leipzig 1997, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 241-260.

History

Dictionaries

Grammars and sketches

— the first grammar of Yoruba.

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Yoruba language

History

Varieties

Dialects

Standard Yoruba

Writing system

Linguistic features

Phonology

Vowels and consonants

Tone

Assimilation and elision

Grammar

Vocabulary

Literature

Oral literature

Written literature

Notes and references

Notes

References

History

Dictionaries

Grammars and sketches

External links